Thanks.
Cary is correct... I've been using blender for 5 years, but only got OK here recently... It's kind of a snowball effect.
Check out my site for more stuff...
www.madshipyard.com
Thanks for the link. I will. So far I am lost on the site, but will look at Blender and try. All I am decent at is GIMP
Don't worry... if you want to do it, you'll catch on soon enough.
Yeah, this sort of thing is NOT something you pick up on from reading a book (reading a book is a good idea, mind you, but AFTER you've already test-driven the stuff, to find out what little bits you've missed!)
If you can think in 3D, you can do this. If you can't, you won't be able to... or rather, will struggle at it. Basically, you're creating the stuff inside your head, and then translating from those in-head design elements to the closest possible representations you can make using the 3D tools.
There are some things you can pick up from reading basic tutorials... and watching tutorial videos helped me dramatically in terms of learning Maya... but still, you really only learn how to do things when you actually do them.
So download the application, install it, and start playing. Don't assume you'll be able to do ANYTHING initially... just make some simple shapes (spheres, cylinders, etc) to play with... figure out how to render them... figure out where various things are in the program structure and what, generally-speaking, those things do.
Once you know all that, you can start thinking about how to start making some simple models and start doing some simple renders. Once you know that backwards and forwards, you can start adding to your repertoire... which is what MadMan has been doing... he's got a pretty good toolset at this point, but that's because he started with the basics and let the knowledge "grow" from there... right?
